Watch tributes to Bob Friend on Sky News

Bob Friend was one of the BBC’s most distinctive and affable correspondents, covering Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Australia, Japan and the US, before moving to become a memorable presenter with Sky News.

Robert Francis Friend was born in 1938. He spent his early years in Tunbridge Wells. Although he passed his 11-plus and won a scholarship to The Skinners’ School, he did not live up to his initial academic promise and he left school at 15 to work as a junior reporter on the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser (now the Kent and Sussex Courier), where his first assignments were Coronation street parties.

Around this time Friend became a devout Christian and served as a “boy preacher” at the independent mission chapel in Rusthall, near Tunbridge Wells. He was a fine orator — perhaps honing his resonant and warm broadcasting voice at those youth meetings — and it was expected that he would go to theological college and become a Baptist minister. However, National Service came in l956, and Friend later confessed that he lost his faith in the sleazy Hong Kong district of Wanchai while serving as a corporal clerk with the 48th Gurkha Infantry Brigade.

On his return to the UK Friend helped to set up the West Kent News Agency. When pickings were thin he and his fellow reporters enjoyed selling stories about local notables to the Fleet Street gossip columns, but eventually the agency got into financial difficulty, and in the late 1960s Friend moved to the BBC. He joined the Home Service South-East Regional News, but with the re-organisation of radio in the 1970s he became a reporter in an expanded pool at Radio Four.

It was Friend’s good fortune that his producer and mentor on the regional news, Marshall Stewart, became the editor of the Today programme. For five years from 1969 Friend rotated between working as a reporter for Today and covering Northern Ireland. He also made a lengthy trip to Vietnam towards the end of the war.

In 1974 BBC News decided to appoint its first staff correspondent in Australia. Friend, given his experience and his open, genial personality, was a natural for the job. His tenure coincided with the re-emergence of the former Labour Minister John Stonehouse, who had disappeared from Miami Beach leaving his clothes behind, Cyclone Tracy, which killed 71 people and demolished 70 per cent of Darwin, and the sacking of Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister, by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.

Friend also set a new standard in Royal coverage with his humorous and non-deferential news documentary of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour across the Pacific. In Darwin he persuaded her to place a radio microphone in her handbag so that viewers could hear her talking to the survivors of Cyclone Tracy. The Queen recalled that journey when she appointed Friend MBE in June 2003.

Christmastide l974, when Stonehouse and Cyclone Tracy hit the headlines, was the peak of Friend’s career as a BBC correspondent. Friend, in London for a year’s-end international review for BBC2, flew to Sydney, arriving on Christmas Day to find a pack of Fleet Street reporters scouring Melbourne for Stonehouse and the only communication with Darwin was an emergency Morse code signal.

Eventually he outwitted his Fleet Street rivals to gain exclusive access to Stonehouse. One interview was filmed in Pentridge Prison, Melbourne, with Stonehouse’s underwear drying on a washing line in the background.

Friend loved Australia, and when Al Grassby, the Immigration Minister in the Whitlam Government, suggested it, he, his wife Marion and their two daughters were sworn in as Australian citizens at a special ceremony.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation offered him the presenter’s position on its morning radio show, AM, but Friend suggested Red Harrison (obituary, August 1, 2008) instead and moved to be the BBC’s correspondent in Tokyo. That posting, during which he followed closely Nissan’s moves to set up a plant in Sunderland and was often consulted for advice about the UK, ended in l983.